10 Unbelievable Inspirations Behind Your Favourite Video Games

Released in 2001, Silent Hill 2 was a critical and commercial success, heralded as the greatest entry in the entire franchise. Strangely enough, the game was actually influenced by Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment – a novel written in nineteenth-century, released in twelve equal instalments in The Russian Messenger.

In the novel, the protagonist is forced to deliberate upon the morality or murder, suffering a tremendous amount of mental anguish in the process.

In the game, James Sunderland is revealed to have committed the act himself, punishing himself through self-imprisonment. In both cases, the protagonists are tortured immensely by their decisions, the ethics of murder an important theme in the construction of each work.

In terms of style, Silent Hill 2 takes numerous cues from popular cinema, including the works of David Lynch, David Fincher, Alfred Hitchcock and David Cronenberg. With that being said, Takayoshi Sato – lead developer on the series – cited Crime and Punishment as his first inspiration, suggesting that the game’s story was based entirely on the novel, and slowly modified as more writers were added to the project.